politics

Worse Than The Great Depression

«It’s Worse Than The Great Depression» — One In Six Prime-Aged Men Has No Job

ZeroHedge, Sept 7, 2016

What has received far less media attention has been the unprecedented surge in Americans no longer in the labor force, which as of August stood at a near-record 94.4 million.

Millions of prime-aged workers have fallen out of the work force as a result of drastic changes to America’s job market, coupled with structural lack of demand for legacy jobs, which has — for example — sent the number of employed waiters and bartenders to all time highs even as the number of manufacturing workers is lower than it was in December 2014.

Overnight, NPR confirmed that while the nation’s unemployment rate is half of what it was at the height of the Great Recession: saying that the unempoyment number «hides a big problem: Millions of men in their prime working years have dropped out of the workforce — meaning they aren’t working or even looking for a job.»

Citing a recent report by Obama’s Council of Economic Advisors, NPR notes that 83% of men in the prime working ages of 25-54 who were not in the labor force had not worked in the previous year. So, essentially, 10 million men are missing from the workforce.

Putting that number in context, in the 1960s, nearly 100 percent of men between the ages of 25 and 54 worked. That’s fallen over the decades.

The condemnation of Obama’s «recovery» is dire: «One in six prime-age guys has no job; it’s worse than it was in the depression in 1940,» says Nicholas Eberstadt, an economic and demographic researcher who wrote the book Men Without Work: America’s Invisible Crisis. He says these men aren’t even counted among the jobless, because they aren’t seeking work.

Why are men leaving? And what are they doing instead? An anecdote from NPR sheds some light:

They might be like Romeo Barnes. He lives in District Heights, Md., and his last job as a Wal-Mart greeter ended 11 years ago. He’s 30, black, single and has cerebral palsy.

«I have able-bodied friends who can’t find work, so it’s not just me,» Barnes says.

Economists say technology and overseas competition are displacing many jobs. The number of people collecting disability insurance, like Barnes, has also increased.

AEI’s Eberstadt says criminal records may also play a factor. Some 20 million Americans have felony convictions — the vast majority of whom are men. But, he says, it’s hard to know how big a factor that is, because the government doesn’t keep data on their employment status.

«Something on the order of one out of every eight adult men has got a felony conviction, and we don’t have the slightest clue as to their employment patterns,» Eberstadt says.

What the missing men aren’t doing in large numbers is staying home to take care of family. 40% of nonworking women are primary caregivers; that’s true of only 5 percent of men out of the workforce.

It gets worse: If men keep exiting the workforce, that could strain the social safety net.

There is little hope to get those tens of millions of inert prime-aged workers back into the labor force, and absent a substantial overhaul, coupled with reschooling of those who have been out of the workforce, the chances this troubling trend will reverse are slim to none. Meanwhile, it means that as the class and wealth divide, the numbers of increasingly angry people who feel justifiably left out, will continue to rise, until one day not even all the government’s social safety nets will be able to prevent what comes next.